Nine months after the UK Gambling Commission capped bonus wagering at ten times, almost every British casino brand has moved onto the new number, according to a snapshot published by the Casino.net Research Lab.
The lab read 297 welcome offers recorded on 5 October 2026, 148 of them at 128 brands still trading in Britain. Of the 117 trading brands that state a wagering requirement, 115 sit at or under 10x. Fifty-nine sit exactly on it, 34 ask for 1x and 21 ask for nothing. Between 2x and 9x there is a single brand in the entire market.
“Ten times stopped being a ceiling and became the default,” said Katya Vasileva, Head of Product at Casino.net. “Wagering used to be a dial operators turned anywhere between 30x and 200x. Now it is a switch with three positions: nothing, once, or the most the law allows.”
A Rule That Was Expected to Backfire
The cap sits in Social Responsibility Code 5.1.1 and came into force on 19 January 2026, alongside a ban on offers that mix betting, casino, bingo and lottery into one wagering requirement. When the Commission overhauled its rules on promotions in March 2025, not everyone welcomed the change. BetBlocker founder Duncan Garvie called the 10x limit “catastrophically bad”, warning that weaker bonuses could push players towards the black market.
The snapshot does not measure offshore play, so it cannot settle that argument. What it does show is how the licensed shelf has responded.
Exited Brands Ran 3.5 Times the Wagering
Because the database records what an offer is rather than what it was, the lab compared the brands still trading with 56 brands that have since closed in Britain and still carry usable terms. The comparison, set out in the lab’s research into British welcome offers, finds a median of 35x at exited brands against 10x at trading ones. Only 39% of exited brands’ headline offers sat within the cap, against 98% today.
Headline values shrank alongside the multiples. The median cash bonus fell from £90 to £50, and the share of brands leading with cash dropped from 57% to 27%. Free spins with no wagering went the other way, from 9% of exited brands’ offers to 53% of trading brands’ offers.
“We are careful not to read this as cause and effect,” Vasileva said. “Brands leave a market for many reasons. What the data shows is that harsh wagering and market exit travel together in Britain, and that the offers left on the shelf are smaller but far easier to withdraw from.”
Spins Have Replaced Cash
Free spins now appear in 87% of trading brands’ headline offers, and 91 of the 128 brands give spins with no cash at all. The typical package is 100 spins. Only one trading brand offers more than £100 in cash, a £200 match at 10x.
Two Brands Above the Cap
Two brands still show a figure above 10x, one at 50x and one at 60x. The lab has chosen not to name them.
“A figure above the cap can mean a licensee in breach or a stale record on our side, and those are very different things,” Vasileva said. “We checked the earlier outliers against the operators’ own terms in September and corrected the ones that had gone stale. These two are queued for the same check.”
The Small Print Still Lags
The study also found that the clauses most likely to cost players money are the least likely to appear in the short offer terms. Excluded payment methods are recorded there for only 36% of brands, and the max bet with bonus funds for 56%. Table players fare worst: 75% of brands count blackjack and roulette at zero towards wagering, and 82% count live dealer games at zero.
The dataset and figures behind the study are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
About Casino.net
Casino.net is a casino review and comparison platform covering 16 markets. Its rankings are produced by a published rating algorithm that does not use bonus size as an input. The Casino.net Research Lab also publishes research on how long casinos let players self-exclude.